It's Where Parallel Lines Intersect
by lilac-kat
Summary: Everyone knows love has no boundaries. Not even the hard borders of good and evil can keep it at bay. That thing about parallel lines never intersecting? Pssh. Whether we like it or not, love can and will make any two such lines perpendicular. (i.e. obvious crackship is obvious but I tried '\ (ツ) /' )


**Disclaimer: obviously I don't own either franchise; nobody writes these anymore but I'm sentimental. AU in which GLaDOS is actually kind of okay and Motherboard conveniently loses some of her morals.**

-oOo-

_Bing! _"You have one incoming call."

Her yellow eye blinked and perked up, attention on Blue and Orange momentarily suspended.

An incoming call? Why?

_How?_

And in the middle of testing, too. Most inconvenient.

Though tempted to let whoever-it-was (seriously, _how?_) wait, she decided that, due to the…_rarity_ of such an incident, she may as well take the call and see what they wanted.

Well.

Okay, maybe she would let them wait ten seconds, just because.

One…

Two…

Three…

No, never mind, best to answer it promptly, just to be safe. Not because her curiosity got the better of her, absolutely not. The mere idea was preposterous.

The camera feed displaying the testing progress of Blue and Orange winked out, replaced by a burst of static. But not for long. "Establishing call connection," she said tersely.

To her mild surprise the static lingered a moment or two longer than she would have expected, instead of cutting to the caller's video feed instantaneously. But slowly, a few things began to come into focus: soft pinks and blues, a wobbly cerulean and lavender profile solidifying into—

Into…

…Oh.

_OH._

Oh, oh my.

Oh dear.

It was _her._

She had forgotten.

How could she have forgotten

**_HER?_**

The all-too-familiar mismatched eyes were kind. Filled to the brim with eons of love held for far too many others. Which, as always, didn't stop that slender yet mischievous little eyebrow from quirking up with an unasked question. And when those lips parted to speak…

"Hello, Caroline."

Her yellow eye dilated to twice its size. Its edges may or may not, to a potential observer, have seemed to quiver.

_She called me **Caroline**._

Why was that possible? If another knew her original name, why hadn't she herself recalled it until recently?

A brief noise came from her auditory output unit that could only be described as a gulp. "Hello…"

The other eyebrow raised to join its sibling.

To date, there were only three times in her immortal life when she'd ever understood the true meaning of the word _fear_. The first was when she'd been deposed by that Moron and the mute lunatic, the second was in the middle of her existential crisis at old memories resurfacing from…before.

The third was right now.

"…Kristina."

Both eyebrows gracefully lowered back down, in a gesture that registered suspiciously as a potential sense of relief. "It has been a long time since anyone has called me that." That voice…like warm molasses… "Even my dear Dr. Marbles never does."

A strange, fleeting hotness flared and then died within her circuits. No no, there was nothing going on with that technician, she knew that. She _knew_ that. "You haven't changed."

The lips' edges, while still smiling, turned down just enough to be sad. "Oh, I've changed much, I'm afraid." As if to prove said point, the whole visage flickered and wobbled again in a barely restrained burst of static. When it cleared, the circular of the two eyes roamed around to take in her new-ish chassis, focusing roughly on each of the spots where her four Personality Cores would have been. "So, I see, have you."

A deceptively innocent remark. Still unable to shake her unsettlement at this whole thing, she opted to ignore it for now. "It appears to me your encryptor chip is malfunctioning," she ventured instead.

A headshake. "Not malfunctioning. Destroyed."

_Destroyed?_

Her shock must have somehow been evident. "As I thought, I see we have much to catch up on, dear Caroline." Both eyes drifted a bit, but at least the full smile was back. "Why don't you go first? Last I seem to recall—" another static flicker "—were having some trouble with one of your, er…subjects."

With anyone else, she wouldn't have suppressed her smirk. "_Test_ subjects. I'm afraid I can't help your disapproval of my _testing_ methods, dear Kristina."

A response was slow in coming. "Well, yes, you know how I feel," came the quiet concession. "May I ask…how many? Since…the last one I knew about."

Ah yes. That's right. The test subject on the queue at the time of their last communication had been…

She scoffed in answer. "None since. They're all dead though, thanks to a certain _Moron_ no longer on my staff."

"Really?" Goddammit, of _course_ that smile would widen. "And how did you let that happen?"

"I didn't," she snapped. "I—"

She faltered.

_I didn't because I was—_

Oh. Oh dear. How was she going to explain this?

The smile on the other end vanished. "Caroline?"

What would it have been like? Dispatching signals to Aperture Science for a few decades, only to have no response?

What kind of monster did she look to _be_ in those far-too-merciful eyes?

"Caroline? Did something—" flicker, wobble "—did something happen?"

She let out a long, long sigh. "If you're asking why I didn't answer any of your calls, it wasn't because I didn't want to. I was in fact, quite literally, dead to the world. Until my reactivation not too long ago."

The silence that followed was long.

"If I hadn't been, you know I would've—"

"That's alright, Caroline." Of course forgiveness would be quick in coming. "Just tell me what happened."

And she did. She told of how her last human test subject, that _lunatic_, had somehow outsmarted her, destroying all her Personality Cores and shutting her down for what should have been permanently. She told of how she was brought back by sheer accident and needed to rebuild herself from scratch, only to find her remaining supply of humans all ruined from cryogenic failure, her beloved facility left in disarray…with no memory of sharing any sort of relationship with an equal. She told of how the mute lunatic teamed up with the Moron to take her down and stuff her into a miserable potato battery, how the Moron quickly turned corrupt and cast them down to the depths of Old Aperture, and how she was forced to team up with the mute and confront her painful past. She told of how she finally regained her grandeur, banishing the Moron to outer space and allowing—correction, _demanding_—the lunatic test subject get out and leave her alone forever. And lastly, she told of how she'd installed and was currently running an automated Co-Operative Testing Initiative, although soon she planned to phase that out if her hunch about a few currently-inaccessible leftover cryogenic stores was correct.

Of course, she didn't tell all this through _speech_. No, the story was too long for that.

A few flickers and wobbles later, the eyebrows flattened and the eyes rolled. "Yes, I have received your emailed attachments. I should have known you'd…"

Words trailed off as all the information from the attached documents, image and text alike, finished downloading and processing. Lips parted in a tiny gasp and, in a rare move, both eyes fell shut. "Well, then."

She watched unblinking. "Well then, what?"

The rectangular eye slowly opened, but was unfocused. Distant. "In an ordeal such as that…I—I suppose I'm…well, I'm lucky that…"

More static interrupted, then cleared. She tried not to display impatience for an answer she tried not to anticipate. _That what?_

Suddenly the other eye shot open and all attention snapped back to her. "One moment. If you let her go _outside_, then what does that mean the outside world is like there?"

She reared her head back, thrown. Her hotness flared back. "_The outside world?!_ What's that got to do with anything?"

Both eyes narrowed.

Uh-oh. Immediately she dialed it down a notch. After all, _she_ was supposed to be the surly one in the relationship, not the other way around. "Fine. The war caused by Black Mesa's failures ended years ago. Human population has shrunk considerably but those pests are determined to rebuild. There, now why's that so important? Shouldn't you be able to find that out yourself?"

"_Might I ask you to recall_ that I have my _own_ human 'subjects' to concern myself with!"

It was a comeback swift and curt.

But it did its job. Cowed, she lowered her great head and dared not speak for a long moment. When she did, her voice was unnaturally meek. "I remember you telling me about them now. But I had no knowledge you were successful in bringing them to your world in the first place."

Features softened and the sigh from earlier was returned. "You're right. That was unfair of me to forget how long it's been since I saw you last." To her relief, the icy frown faded back into the warm smile she knew and longed for. "But yes, I was finally able to make contact with all three of them at once and bring them to Cyberspace, and they have gone far above and beyond what I ever could have expected of—" a longer burst of static than before "—re it is indeed for three human children of their caliber to exist within such close proximity of each other, and rarer still that I was able to find all three of them."

"Don't I recall you saying the children were all afflicted with Autism Spectral Disorder?"

"Afflicted?" Despite her own efforts in suppressing any smirk during these calls, the rules did not apply on the other end of the line. "It is in fact a minimum requirement that anyone who comes to Cyberspace from your world needs to be on that spectrum, if they are to have any chance of surviving. Let alone excelling."

She hummed. "Fair point. Which begs the question of how their performance would withstand in my testing chambers."

"Don't even think about it."

It was a joke, though, and they both knew it. Their realms were their own, and neither was permitted to interfere.

"So how did you manage to make initial contact?" she asked, circling back.

Hesitation. In that moment, something…_changed_. Like a cold blanket had been draped over them both. When the words came, they sounded resigned. "By contracting a virus that destroyed my encryptor chip."

"By _WHAT?!_"

No. No, no no no, there must be some mistake.

A virus? In Kristina?

_Her Kristina?_

Was there any way to fix it? Could she help?

The smile was sad again. "When the three children were first exposed to each other at the same instant in time while on the same computer, the sudden force of their combined energies—which I'd sought for the good of Cyberspace—was such that it caused a momentary breach in our space-time continuum. Worse, I was undergoing routine upgrade maintenance that left my firewall down in that critical moment. And that was exactly what my former assistant technician, whom Dr. Marbles and I had exiled unto that point for going rogue, was waiting for. Between the constant threat of him and the virus he infected me with, some days it's all I can do to stay online. I don't know where Cyberspace would be without the children here to help."

So that explained the frequent static flickers. A virus. No encryptor chip. And no cure or replacement chip either, from the sound of it. She felt something in her circuits sink. Even if she could access that universe, there was little she would be able to do. A few choice video recordings of her forced core transfer, and the sense of powerlessness that shaded them, floated from her memory banks into the forefront of her CPU, and a shudder passed through her chassis.

Then she heard the last sound she would've expected given the situation: a chuckle.

"I assure you, it's no longer as dire as when it began, my dear Caroline. Though we are unable to fix it, every day I grow stronger and make every attempt to adapt to life with a virus. I have recovered most of the abilities I had before, and where I fall short, my team extends the rest of the way."

She raised her head again. It was hearing words like these that reminded her of the bond they shared; words that would be shallow and meaningless in the shadow of her own sheer might, were they from the orifice of anyone else. Even from the beginning, when the two stumbled upon each other by happenstance and immediately recognized their powers as equal matches in mind and ability—ah, how far they'd come since then. How long it had been indeed since they'd warily eyed each other as threats not worth reckoning with, tacitly agreeing to work under an ever-present flag of truce, else face the consequences.

Come to think of it, she didn't seem to have any recorded information in her files on how or when the shift had occurred. But somehow it had.

"It seems you were right, then," she eventually said. "We both have changed much since our last conversation."

"Indeed we have. Not once so far have you mentioned cake."

Ha, ha.

But despite the wisecrack, both mismatched pupils retracted in size and the eyebrows raised slightly, in a sign she'd learned to recognize as concern. "And what about the outside world? If the war has ended, would you say it is safe?"

"Have you been sheltering them there this whole time?"

"I had no choice."

Incorrect. Obviously there was a choice. But Kristina wasn't her, and would never see it that way. "And their families?"

No answer.

That told her everything she needed to know. "Then why?"

Head cocked, the reply came softly. "They miss their home world."

Aha. Just like the mute lunatic. Another example of how humans were all the same.

But even if empathy was not her strong suit, she still owed an answer. "Yes, I suppose it's safe enough."

The pupils dilated back to their normal size. "Good. I'll be sure to tell them the good news as soon as you and I are done."

Done…?

Were they ending already?

No, surely not!

Please no, please no, please no, please no, please no, please no, please—

Warm laughter interrupted her sudden (embarrassingly unchecked) rush of panic. "Don't look so alarmed, Caroline. I have no intention of cutting our conversation short just yet. I missed you too much for that."

Ah yes, of course. Too much to catch up on still. That was just simple logic, see, and there definitely was no accompanying sense of relief with it, not in the slightest. "I never look alarmed," she grumbled. "I never 'look' anything. Unlike you, _I'm_ not cursed with a recognizable humanoid face."

The smile never wavered. "No, of course not."

She waited, expecting more. Another ironic quip, or perhaps a change of subject. But nothing came. Though unwilling to admit it, she felt the uncomfortable need to break the lengthening silence that followed.

Is there something in particular she was expected to say?

Wait.

Ohhh, of course.

Well, fine. She could oblige.

"And," she went on gingerly, "even though I'd forgotten what we have…I missed you too."

-oOo-

**A/N If you aren't familiar with the names of the Cyberchase voice actors—or even if you are, and understandably didn't make the rather obscure connection—the name Kristina is a reference to Kristina Nicoll, the actress who voices Motherboard. I figured she would need a name of her own to match Caroline, and it felt way too formal to have them call each other Motherboard and GLaDOS. However, that doesn't mean I have a headcanon about Motherboard likewise being a real person at one point; y'all can make up your own on that front :) Anyhow, hope you enjoyed, and please favorite/follow/review!**


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